The Second Serve // Sergeant P. Tester

Having moved on from trying to be a celeb photographer, Brooklyn Beckham’s latest wheeze is trying to reinvent himself as a celeb chef instead, having launched a new Facebook show this week “Cookin’ With Brooklyn” – kickstarting the promo for it with a video for Vogue.

To showcase his budding culinary skills, Brooklyn chooses to prepare a meal for his fiancée Nicole of… pasta and cheese.

The sort of simple, easy-to-whip-up dish that anyone at home watching can have a go at, right? Except the Grand Padoma parmesan cheese wheel that Brooklyn cuts open especially for this recipe costs around 420 quid a pop.

FYI: Brooklyn Beckham’s fiancée is lactose intolerant.

With talk in the papers this weekend that there are more tapes circulating from Allegra Stratton’s mock press conferences (ones that allegedly show No.10’s comms team joking about the PM’s mistresses and love children) we’re still no further on in finding out the provenance of this secret archive footage. So we asked someone in the industry for their thoughts on it.

anon writes:
“The more I think about it, the odder it is. Doing that job you would 100% delete that footage, not because of what was on it but just procedurally. You’d do it regularly at least once a month. So someone kept that footage aside for over a year is my guess…

“Video files are huge. A fake press conference would be multi-cam, so a really substantial file size. You would be wiping hard drives regularly, we were always doing that… So that footage was definitely not just sitting there for months until it happened to get leaked…

“What’s so strange is who would have the footage in the first place. It wasn’t for broadcast so only a handful of people would have needed to see it. A director, maybe, a data manager and whoever commissioned the shot. It’s a bizarre thing to keep for a year.”

After mentioning Nick Candy in last Thursday’s mailout (and the magazine he once published to celebrate his marriage to Holly Valance) someone who knows his in-laws dropped us a line.

You’ll be surprised to hear that their impression of this billionaire Tory donor/property developer – who was happily photographed at Shaun Bailey’s lockdown-busting booze-up – is not an entirely positive one.

“Holly is a really great person, very down to earth… and she married a complete asshole. He has about four billion and counting but was too stingy to help her mum and Holly’s sister – who has a disability – move house. They liked him for a while but now the general feeling is loathing.”

Gaining 30m followers on Instagram. Getting an £80k monthly allowance. Starring in your own rags-to-riches fly-on-the-wall Netflix series about your life. There’s some serious perks to being Cristiano Ronaldo’s baby mama, so we wonder if the Popbitch reader who once hooked up with CR7 is regretting letting things slide after one shag.

It happened during his first spell at United, back in the early noughties. She was working at the Trafford Centre doing promotions and got talking to the winger when he was out shopping.

The conversation elicited an invitation to a hotel room for sex. An occasion during which, she says, he never once took his sunglasses off.

There’s a story in the Times today expressing bemusement about how big Westlife still are in China, where 27 million fans signed in to watch a gig of theirs streamed on the internet this weekend.

Big numbers like that are impressive, but they don’t do much to get across the sheer intensity of the fan-love the boys enjoy out there. Weirdly enough, it’s something we’ve experienced first-hand. Popbitch went to China with Westlife on their last tour there (Summer 2019) and saw them play two totally sold-out concerts in the Macau Venetian’s 15k capacity venue.

The front-row fans were so out of control that we (and Mark’s lovely fiancé Cailean) had to be given a security protection detail at the side of the stage during the gig.

Last week it emerged that Eric Clapton has successfully sued an eBay user in Germany over a single CD she was selling for £8.45. Seeing as he’s picking fights over such paltry sums, perhaps it’s time we brought up a little outstanding debt that old Slowhand owes one of our readers.

This reader tells us she was in a café overlooking Richmond Bridge in the early 60s with her then-boyfriend, sat alongside a pre-fame Eric Clapton who was tucking into a coffee and sandwich. The couple sort of vaguely knew him, so when they saw he was patting down his pockets and claiming he had no money to pay his bill, our reader felt happy shouting him the cash.

She handed him a ten-shilling note which Clapton took, paid his bill with, then pocketed the change for himself and left. They crossed paths with him a number of times in the intervening years, but he never once offered to reimburse her.

In today’s money, that comes to about £11.20. So don’t get too comfortable with your £8.45 just yet, Eric…

The top five as it currently stands ahead of Friday’s big chart reveal:1/ Elton/Ed/Ladbaby: the dreadful sausage roll song has an early lead, with the highest number of downloads

2/ Elton and Ed are then just behind themselves with the non-sausage roll version of the same song

3/ Wham!’s Last Christmas is the UK’s number one streaming track

4/ Mariah’s All I Want For Christmas is streaming just behind Wham!

5/ The Kunts’ Boris Johnson Is STILL A Fucking Cunt is downloading heavily but really needs a streaming uplift

Another week means another 50 songs haphazardly snapped into bits, then jammed together and taped into five short audio quizzes. You just have to identify the songs and the artists featured in each.This week’s themes:

Mon/ Christmas Covers
Tue/ France
Wed/ White Christmas
Thu/ 8-bit II
Fri/ Now That’s What I Call Xmas!

You can always find the latest daily audio quiz [here]

Roman Abramovich’s jet is up for sale
[Get your offer in]

How a small-time Tennessee company came to manage Britney and make millions
[Read on NYT]

The Ninja Turtles Christmas Album
[Listen on YouTube]

Britney’s Toxic in the style of the B-52s
[Listen on Bandcamp]